I had trouble getting GD to install on Strawberry. As in "I gave up". Other than that I am very fond of Strawberry.

I realise that it should be fairly easy to download the GD C library source and compile it, and then use it to build the XS component of GD. I fiddled around for a while and since I was pressed for time, I just installed the GD.ppm module for Activestate and generated the graphs I needed to generate.

In other words, AS and Strawberry coexist peacefully on the same machine, so you can always use both. Executing a particular perl binary by specifying its full path is sufficient for it to locate the libraries that belong to it. The question comes down to which one you wish to use by default when you run 'perl' from a DOS box. That just depends on your PATH setting.